Shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation

“Zodiac moves in alluvial patterns, gathering the sediment of mythologies, artifacts, and cultural practices and redistributing them in the forceful current of Zeqo’s cascading, mostly unbroken stanzas. [. . .] In its playful prophecy, Zodiac smolders with a restless magic and affords English readers and important access point to a distinctive Albanian voice[.]” —Notre Dame Review

“[A] crucial artifact for poetry, for transnational art, for mythology and language, and for perspective. [. . . An] elegant jumble of human experience, a manic meditation of the person’s place in and out of time.” American Microreviews & Interviews

“Zeqo plays an ecstatic lyric game [. . .] We can imagine a poem like a full-fleshed lion that might open its mouth to explain the connections between all things.” —Entropy

“Zeqo’s poems explode socialist realism with exuberant bursts of imagination [. . .] Reminiscent of other rabble-rousing poets born mid-20th century in the Soviet Union’s shadow (such as Slovenia’s Tomaz Salamun and Poland’s Piotr Sommer), these poems reflect a particularly Albanian point of view[.] [E]very poem crackles with life.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Zeqo’s poems] have a toughness, a lively shrewdness, even at their most melancholic. They are surehanded and straightforward with their language, vigorous, brief, learned and unsentimental[.] —Lizzie Hutton, Rain Taxi

“[G]reat art is timeless, and there is plenty of it here.” —Piotr Florczyk, West Branch